In 2023, Sarah Jewett was on her honeymoon in France when she received a life-changing text: steam was flowing from Fervo Energy’s first commercial geothermal project in Nevada. That moment confirmed their revolutionary approach—applying horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing from the oil and gas industry to tap heat resources previously considered inaccessible.
Unlike traditional geothermal that requires rare, steam-laden sites, Fervo’s technology can access hot rock that exists almost everywhere underground. After proving their concept with Project Red in Nevada, the company is now building Cape Station, a 500-megawatt facility that will be one of America’s largest geothermal plants, in Utah.
In this episode, Lara talks with Sarah about navigating first-of-a-kind financing challenges, finding partners willing to take on the risk of new technology, and deciding when to take the next step in a scaling journey.
Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
Register here for Transition-AI 2025 in Boston on June 12th, 2025. Use promo code LATITUDEPODS10 for 10% off your ticket.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.
Lara Pierpoint: Two years ago, Sarah Jewett was biking through the French countryside with her husband when she got a text from her colleague at Fervo Energy.
Sarah Jewett: Then I looked at my phone and I just started crying physically. I was like, oh my gosh.
Lara Pierpoint: Sarah was on her honeymoon. So she’d turned off pretty much all of her notifications. So getting a text from a coworker meant either something very good or very bad had happened. Where exactly were you, Sarah? When this moment occurred,
Sarah Jewett: I was in Bone France and I received a text from Jack Norbeck, our CTO and co-founder, of the silencer with white steam coming out of the top.
Lara Pierpoint: A silencer might sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s actually part of a geothermal well, and that photo her colleague sent of the steam coming out of the top of it, it was a huge deal for Sarah because that meant that their first commercial project was working. Of course, on that day in France, it was way less of a huge deal for her husband.
Sarah Jewett: He’s like, what? There’s steam. He is like, can we keep biking? So it was this hugely emotional moment for me.
Lara Pierpoint: In May of 2023 Fervo Energy’s Project Red in Northern Nevada officially became the most productive, enhanced geothermal system in history up until that point.
Sarah Jewett: We were started with the idea that we have had a ton of breakthroughs in how we extract oil and gas in the United States. And Geothermals is industry that’s been sort of flat for a long period of time. And why can’t we apply some of the innovation that we’ve discovered in subsurface characterization and development to apply it to the geothermal energy industry and produce carbon-free energy from the ground?
Lara Pierpoint: The project was Fervo’s first commercial plant and it was a make or break moment for the company to succeed. Fervo had to prove that its innovative discovery and drilling techniques would work for geothermal and be cost competitive. Sarah knew how high the stakes were.
Sarah Jewett: The way it works is that the first time they drill that well always takes the longest. They don’t know anything about the rock, the area, et cetera. So those wells always take the longest though the most high cost. But then over time, the cost to drill wells in that field as the learnings increase drops precipitously.
Lara Pierpoint: Fervo worked on Project Red for over a year before testing the first well for steam, which is why that text from Jack Norbeck on her honeymoon came as such a relief for Sarah. It meant that FerFervo now had a commercial facility producing steam, and although that wasn’t the end goal, it was a major milestone in proving that FerFervo’s technology worked as predicted.
Sarah Jewett: I think the moment that we opened our production for the very first time while injecting fluid into the injection well and saw steam coming out of our silencer, it was this moment of I think just ultimate silence on the team just because everyone was choked up like, oh my gosh, there is hot fluid coming from our wells and we can see it and we can hear it. Oh my gosh.
Lara Pierpoint: I’m Lara Pierpoint and this is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We’ve already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of those technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don’t have decades to get them commercialized. We have years. This week I talk with Sarah Jewett, vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy about the company’s revolutionary approach to producing power from geothermal wells and what it’s proven so far.
Sarah Jewett: We are harvesting heat from the earth to generate power. Power is our main focus, but when you pull up heat and you have a lot of heat, there are a lot of things you can do with it, but this business has really driven strategically towards producing large scale power projects. In the five years that I have been at Fervo,
Lara Pierpoint: Fervo is bringing two major innovations from the oil and gas industry to geothermal, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. For decades, the geothermal industry has only been able to tap resources in a few specific locations.
Sarah Jewett: Traditional geothermal was targeting specific geographies and specific geologies where there were these resources heavily laden with steam. And in traditional geothermal, you could basically stick a straw to the ground and pull the steam out and then run that steam through a turbine to generate electricity
Lara Pierpoint: By leveraging innovations from the oil and gas industry. Fervo isn’t limited to specific places. Hot rock exists almost everywhere underground. You just have to drill deep enough.
Sarah Jewett: So when you go back to the geothermal energy industry, you can think, okay, there are very few places where there’s steam laid in resource, but there are very many places where there’s really, really, really hot rock. And what if we developed a system where we could take water that we find in a water well or from a brackish resource on surface and then push it across this hot rock, making it really, really hot, and then extract that water to generate our own energy from it.
Lara Pierpoint: This is exactly what the oil and gas industry did when conventional resources became harder to find. It developed technologies to tap unconventional resources, and now Fervo is applying those same techniques to underground heat. To paint a picture for listeners,
Sarah Jewett: You can think of drilling down straight to 8,000 feet and then basically turning and drilling out another 5,000 feet. So you now have an L-shaped, well now double that.
Lara Pierpoint: So Fervo system has two wells next to each other, and each well has a horizontal portion that runs parallel to the other.
Sarah Jewett: When you fracture those wells, what happens is you push water at high pressure out of the wells, that water goes perpendicular to the well bore, and it creates all of these minuscule little fractures from the well bore and outwards.
Lara Pierpoint: These tiny fractures create a network connecting the two wells, allowing water to flow between them.
Sarah Jewett: And so then you could push water down an injection well, just by way of pressure, it will be pushed into the rock across all of these hairline fractures that were created through hydraulic fracturing, and it will move towards this production well, and then if you pull it up the production well, it’ll be substantially hotter
Lara Pierpoint: And this is how the steam is created, which can then be used to generate power. But FerFervo needed to prove this technology would work in a real world setting. This is where Project Red comes in. The flow test that Sarah spoke about at the top of the show proves that FerFervo’s techniques could produce steam capable of generating electricity, but any first of a kind project, it had its challenges.
Sarah Jewett: Oh, what challenges did we encounter? It kind of felt like a challenge a day keeps the doctor away.
Lara Pierpoint: But none of those challenges kept Project Red from being successful or from becoming a stepping stone to a much bigger Fervo project Cape Station in Utah. I talked with Sarah about both Project Red and Cape Station and how Fervo has worked through Major first of a kind challenges like permitting, financing, offtake agreements and construction. So I think we’ll start at the beginning of the story of your first commercial project, which was called Project Red. So talk about what this project was and what it meant for the company.
Sarah Jewett: Project Red was an uplift project, and what that means is we found an existing geothermal power site, blue Mountain in north central Nevada and Blue Mountain had a bunch of these traditional geothermal wells already drilled. They were already producing geothermal fluid and sending it to a power facility, generating power from it, and then putting it onto the grid. What we were looking for was a place to test our subsurface technology without actually having to go raise the capital to test the subsurface technology and build the power facility and build the T&GD infrastructure to get it onto the grid. And so basically what we constructed was a plan to approach existing power operators and say, Hey, we don’t want to touch your traditional hydrothermal geothermal resource that all of your existing wells are sitting on top of, but we want to go to the edge of your field that is much more hot dry rock.
That is much more of the type of resource we are looking to develop. We want to go drill a two well system produce from test our subsurface technology and then build a pipeline to your existing power facility and then sell you the hot brine that we pull out. And basically just to test our subsurface technology. The proposition to them was very interesting because they thought, okay, this is great. We put nothing at risk. You come to the edge of our field, you go do your science project and if it works, we actually get the upside from the project. That’s sort of what we were selling. I think what we found when we went to the market was there was more reluctance than we had anticipated for people to let us into the edge of their field, but there was plenty of appetite and we actually identified a number of key sites and ended up the Blue Mountain facility, which was a great first project site. So we ended up building roughly a three megawatts system, a pair of wells. We actually ended up building three wells. One was a vertical monitoring, well that had a bunch of toys in it to sort of monitor the entire system so we could learn from it. And then we drilled and completed a two well system, an injection and a producer well so that we could push water down the injection, pull it up the production, well generate some power uplift for that existing facility.
Lara Pierpoint: And as much as you were encountering reluctance from the power producers, what was driving that? What were the key risks? Were they just worried that by virtue of being on the edge of your field you might do something that would sort of jeopardize their existing power production? Or was it about the particular brine you were using and whether that would mix with their sort of natural brines? Well, or what were the things that they were concerned about?
Sarah Jewett: You hit it on the head. It was basically how connected are the geothermal systems where you’re drilling with our existing geothermal systems and will there be any interface between vrFervo, this unknown quantities science project that they were building at the time and our existing geothermal operating power plant that we’re selling onto the grid today. So I think that was biggest reluctance was will there be any interruption in our existing production?
Lara Pierpoint: And let’s talk a little bit about the offtake you had for this project because you signed a pretty interesting and sort of first of a kind agreement to make this happen, right?
Sarah Jewett: That’s right. So I’ve already talked about the main component which was we’re going to go build this two well subsurface test system. We’re going to sell the grind to an existing operator, but to sort of sweeten that deal, we said, okay, and then we’ll bring an offtaker on the backend that can sort of account for any power uplift that is coming onto the grid that’s additional. And so we ended up landing Google for that contract and Google said, we are also not going to put anything at risk, but in the event that you end up producing electrons from this system, we will pay you for those electrons. And so that was sort of the deal that we struck with them.
Lara Pierpoint: I think I know a little bit about how Google’s really interested in carbon free power, but was there something specific that drew them to this around geothermal or was this just part of their broader strategy around procurement of carbon free electrons?
Sarah Jewett: I think of large tech companies, Google is really a pioneer in the way that they are thinking about what needs to be done to get these next generation technologies onto the grid. Obviously they’re very well aware of their future power needs and they more than most are willing to think creatively about how to help meet that future load growth. And so I think this project was one in a portfolio of projects they were looking at where they realize, okay, we actually do have to provide support for some of these technologies to get up and running. And when we look at the amount of benefit that that, just having Google’s name attached to the project provided to us, it was truly immense and they knew that they knew what would be better, obviously capital, but in the absence of capital participation, just allowing us to use their brand name and saying, Google’s going to watch this project it, they think that it’s something that could be part of their future portfolio to meet their load growth and they’re going to attach their name to this, that was huge for us.
Lara Pierpoint: So you mentioned capital as being a really important piece of the puzzle here. So you’ve got a partnership with a power producer, which is really critical given particularly some of the risks that they might otherwise see. You’ve got an offtake agreement with Google. How did you ultimately finance this project?
Sarah Jewett: So this is the tricky, tricky part about financing first of a kind demonstrations. You typically wish to have lower cost capital and end up with higher cost capital. So this was, we ended up raising corporate equity to fund this first demonstration.
Lara Pierpoint: Do you have anything you can tell folks out there with respect to kind of advice or lessons learned around how to do that successfully? Because I think part of what we see is that series B capital raises and anything later stage is getting increasingly difficult for these companies. So what were some of the things that ultimately sold your investors on your plans? Was it about your project pipeline, was it about the particular technology? I know it was all of the above, but do you have a sense for, what were some of the things that you did that really managed to solidify the support you got for that capital
Sarah Jewett: When you’re raising venture capital at a series A or a series B or a series C with a large technology demonstration ahead? I think that there are a couple of ways to present that to the market in a way that brings them along with you. One, you always have to try to get to whatever your minimum viable product is with the capital that you have. And so the way that VRBO did it was we said, alright, we’re going to do desktop computer modeling. That’s our minimum viable product for say a series A, and then we’re going to go do a very small test in the field that is a much scaled down version of what we will ultimately do that will maybe answer the main key outstanding questions of what is needed to make the technology viable. And then step three will be a small scale single unit system of what will be ultimately a multi-unit system.
And then step four is the multi-unit system. So that’s exactly what we did. We went from desktop modeling where we said, here are the key milestones that we need to hit to show that this is successful. Once you use the capital that you have your seed capital to show that it is successful and cross off your milestones, then you can basically have that relative success. Okay, we met all these milestones with the demonstration that we did to go back to the market to raise more capital. And when you go to the market to raise more capital, you say, this is what we did, this is what we’re going to do and the milestones we’re going to achieve that makes you know that we’re successful. And then you raise capital there. So we actually raised post desktop studies. We raised capital for a very small scale demonstration.
We went into an existing highly deviated well in the same field where we ended up building Project Red and we did a four stage hydraulic fracture in different geologies because people thought one, can this team execute two, can they actually frack a geothermal reserFervoir three, can they pull together the supply chain elements and the permitting elements? And so that really small scale demonstration prior to Project Red proved that we could do all of those things and then we went into Project Red. And so I do think it’s about incrementally growing what you’re trying to build and then setting the target milestones that will show that you’re successful and then hitting those target milestones if that’s what has allowed us to continue to raise capital along the way.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay. So let’s talk for a second about your second big commercial project. So one thing that we know about Climate Hard Tech is that there is never any rest for the weary. And so of course as you all are working on and building Project Red, you’re also actively working on the pipeline of projects you have in store. So can you talk a little bit about what you were thinking about the next project to follow Project Red? When did you actually start contemplating and scoping what that would be? Tell us about that moment.
Sarah Jewett: Yeah. When I joined FerFervo in the middle of 2020, the team already had a pipeline of 15 projects, which is just crazy to think about now. But we had already identified a number of different future projects and started to amass lease acreage positions in various different places. So Fervo’s early strategy was gathering a lot of quality geothermal resource and leasing it for future developments. So we basically had our eye on a couple of different sites as the next project. At that point in time, actually, when we were looking at building Project Red, we thought that this repower agreement or this power uplift agreement would be something that was actually cookie cutter for us that we started doing a bunch of. We went to all the geothermal power facilities in the US that all had declining brine effectiveness, and we were just going to drill our systems around the outside and provide power uplift to these facilities. And so we had a number of these repower type projects in the pipeline very early on. What ended up happening is as we’re developing Project Red at the end of 2020 and in 2021, a huge demand signal hit the market,
Lara Pierpoint: That demand signal was so big that FGO decided to immediately accelerate its scaling strategy. More about that after the break
Sarah Jewett: In June of 2021, the California Public Utilities Commission launched the midterm reliability ruling, which I think is one of the biggest pieces of policy that has impacted our business to date. And it required all California load serving entities to procure firm clean energy. It was just a gigawatt, but it was high capacity factor, non weather dependent clean energy resources. And all of a sudden geothermal was on the map. It was like, okay, there’s a gigawatt of demand for this and it actually has a deadline. And that ended up opening the door for us with a lot of large off-takers in California to actually have real offtake discussions where they were motivated to buy the product that we were selling. And so all of a sudden it seemed a little bit more appealing to us to start going to build larger projects rather than continuing to test this technology on smaller projects can get really good. And so I think that was the point in time when our Greenfield pipeline ended up sort of jumping our repower pipeline and there were a couple of key projects in Nevada and in Utah or land masses that we had our eye on. And then Utah Forge went and started drilling their own wells in southwest Utah. And I think that’s what ended up leading us there.
Lara Pierpoint: And what was the sequencing there? Because I think one of the things again that many startups struggle with is how long do you wait for the data and the information from the demo or from the first commercial installation before you really walk in your design and your decisions around your next project? How did you all think about that? Was there a specific set of outcomes you were waiting for with Project Red before you really committed to your site or to other aspects of your next commercial project? Or how did you think about that sequencing and the timing
Sarah Jewett: While it would be more relaxing to be able to think that you can always see projects to conclusion and then allow some time for those conclusions to sort of settle in and inform the next project? I think the next project is always being built before you see a reasonable set of definitive outcomes from the previous project if you are really on the entrepreneurial journey. So that well test where we were watching Steam first come from the silencer was in early Q2 of 2023, and by late Q2 of 2023, we were drilling at our first Greenfield site. So I think the turnaround pretty quick and we had to take some of that midstream feedback that we were gathering during Project Red and basically begin our Cape Station learnings based off of those things.
Lara Pierpoint: So let’s talk a little bit about site selection for Cape Station. You’ve already mentioned Utah. You mentioned this was a location where some wells were being drilled. I know you were also considering some sites in Nevada, which is I think the state that folks a lot of times think of as synonymous with a lot of geothermal. So what ultimately led to your decision to pursue this site in Utah?
Sarah Jewett: So we were looking at a site in Nevada and a site in Utah as the most high quality potential geothermal resources. And then the other layer that we put on top of that is they needed access into California because we anticipated that the majority of our off-takers would actually be in California for these projects. And so both of these sites had that. They had anticipated high quality geothermal resources, they had access to California. One was in the geothermal state in Nevada and one was in Utah, which has a more robust oil and gas supply chain, but not a ton of existing geothermal, some existing geothermal energy, but not as much as Nevada. So the Department of Energy sponsored a test project, Utah Forge run by University of Utah, and Forge had just started drilling wells in southwest Utah when I joined Fervo. And basically they were really open with their data.
They were publishing their data, they were publishing all of their learnings about drilling rates and what bits they were using, et cetera. And honestly, their information provided a huge amount of value to us because geothermal, unlike wind and solar where you can measure it by observing surface conditions, you have to know about the subsurface resource in order to have high confidence that you can go build A-G-F-M-L facility in a place. And so the work that the Forge was doing was rapidly basically de-risking our acreage there because we were able to understand more and more and more about the subsurface. And so it actually became very clear to us that our Southwest Utah resource was less risky and therefore would require fewer traditional wildcat wells.
Lara Pierpoint: And you also did some pretty robust community engagement as I understand it. Is that right? Can you talk a little bit about what you did and what sort of response you got from the local community in Utah?
Sarah Jewett: So when I rolled into town in 2021, Milford, Utah was actually undergoing a meaningful shift because the largest economic driver in Beaver County was actually a large swath of hog farms owned by Smithfield and Smithfield raised hogs in southwest Utah and then would transport them over the border into California for processing. And they had recently that they were starting to close some of their hawk farm facilities in this region. So when I showed up in 2021, there was a little bit of doom and gloom in the air where the locals said, we’re going to see these closures soon, we’re going to see a lot of job loss. And so I showed up and I asked to meet with the city treasurer in Milford. And before I knew it, I had the mayor, the entire city council and the treasurer there, and I was introducing a potential future project based on some sort of exploration work we had done in the state of Nevada. So I would say that was a pretty nerve wracking moment. I explained to them who we were and what we were thinking about, and they told me what was going on in the region. And it’s very funny, the mayor jokes with me now that when I walked out of that room and he went back to his office, he was like shaking his head and was like, I’ll believe it when I see it.
That’s awesome. And here we are. And now the first text I get every Christmas and every Thanksgiving is from Mayor Nolan Davis from Milford, Utah.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s awesome. Okay, so let’s switch gears for a second and talk about how you funded this project, because now we’re talking about something that’s very different by at least one. If not, I would imagine more than one order of magnitude bigger than what you were doing previously. So how did you think about, I think first and foremost scoping your project, and I know you are basically employing some modularization and how you’re approaching the construction here. So talk a little bit about how you scoped it, how you’re thinking about the modules and the gradual growth of the sites and then what that has meant for the financing model you’ve undertaken.
Sarah Jewett: So what we’re building is a half a gigawatt project. We’re building a 500 megawatt project. The first hundred megawatts will be delivered by 2026, and the remaining 400 megawatts will be delivered by 2028. So it is very much an ongoing project. We at this point in time have drilled the majority of the wells for phase one and are constructing the power facility for phase two and then ordering all of the major key components for power facility for phase one. So phase one is sort of coming to conclusion over the next 10 to 11 months. We’re targeting hot commissioning by this time next year, and phase one is a hundred megawatts. We basically are using 3 33 megawatt turbines is a little bit of a simplification, but there will be three power facilities that will make up this a hundred megawatts phase. And then basically we decided to further modularize and move to using 50 megawatt standardized units for phase two.
And so for phase two we’ll be designing very standard 50 megawatt units hoping to be able to use those 50 megawatt units for projects in the future. And that’s our model going forward. Second question about financing. I loved that you used. How did you finance this project? Because I think I’ll make a small, and for me a very painful correction in how are we financing this project because it is an ongoing journey and I think that that is probably pretty consistent across any first of a kind large infrastructure project. When you look at the wind and solar industry, those industries are fairly de-risked. And so oftentimes you can sign a commercial agreement very early on and go finance against that commercial agreement because there’s a lot of certainty around the execution of those projects. That is not the way it is in geothermal energy. So you have to sign the commercial agreement to make the project real, but you can’t actually take it to a bank and finance against it.
And so we have seen what I understand to be a pretty traditional model for infrastructure projects, but layer first of a kind technology, large scale deployment of technology solutions on top of that. So they always start with very high cost financing as you’re de-risking the major early milestones, the highest risk milestones of the project, and then as you go along and you prove more out, the cost of capital goes down and more capital becomes available to you. We have definitely seen that on this project where all of the early phases of Cape Station phase one, we have been financing with corporate equity. And then as we’ve gone along and as the financial markets have started to perceive a de-risking actually happen and they can diligence that, then more capital has become available to us. So we’re now pursuing a much more traditional project finance model that has project-based equity and project-based debt, and we’re pulling all of that together as we speak.
Lara Pierpoint: Let’s actually talk for a second about the offtake agreements that you ultimately signed for this project because as you mentioned, there was a pretty robust demand signal coming from California, but a policy signal does not necessarily immediately translate into the ironclad contracts one might want. So how did you think about approaching customers to buy the electricity? Were you still looking at the tech community or was it really about the utilities in California and how did you ultimately convince them that this was the power they wanted to buy?
Sarah Jewett: So all of our existing binding commercial offtake agreements are with California load serving entities, and they have mostly procured under this MTR regulatory ruling. And so I do think we’ve seen the offtake market eFervolve over time at the start, and the people who are really willing to come to the negotiating table today are real loading entities who have a lot of practice signing these binding and long-term offtake agreements. When we started talking to tech companies about these projects, and I am sort of saying beyond Google, because Google we’ve remained in close discussions with, and we’ve signed another power purchase agreement with Google in Nevada, but for Cape Station, we started talking to a lot of tech companies who were looking for much faster turnaround than traditional utilities expect. And so we have signed commercial agreements with utilities and community source aggregators and other littering entities for a three or four year development timeline or even five and six. And I think the tech companies that started to come to the table about a year or two years ago we’re looking for 18 months turnaround time. These projects were simply too early stage at that point in time and had too long a development timeline. I think now we’re seeing a little bit more of a robust demand from the tech community for slightly longer term thinking, and there’s a lot more real negotiating leverage behind a lot of those off agreements in a way we haven’t seen before.
Lara Pierpoint: So when did you break ground? How did that feel?
Sarah Jewett: We broke ground in June of 2023 and it felt absolutely incredible. It was like this thing that we had talked about for forever, and it’s so interesting in startup life time is both fast and slow. I really felt like we were never going to finish project red, it felt like forever. And then here we are multiple years into Cape Station and it’s gone really fast, but the beginning felt really good and it felt very immense at that point in time, like, wow, we’re really going to take on this huge beast after having completed this, what felt like a huge beast, but was at the time 100th of what we were planning to build at Cape Station and is now even smaller than that.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s amazing. So what have you actually built so far at Cape Station? Where are you in the process?
Sarah Jewett: This is very cool. We have actually built, we’ve drilled I think 21 of 24 wells for our first phase. And so we’re almost completely finished with our drilling phase and we have cleared the pads for all three power facilities and built foundations and on one of the power facilities, we’re already installing air cooled condensers and starting to see, it’s really fun to monitor slack these days because you see large equipment being loaded onto boats headed our direction, and it’s just like, wow, those are coming for Utah. Cool. Let’s get ’em there.
Lara Pierpoint: Can you talk for a second about your decision to build the power production infrastructure? So you’re doing it yourselves. You could have theoretically contracted with someone else to sort of be your power production facility construction organization or maybe to run the operations of the power production side of the business. What led you to decide to take all that on yourself?
Sarah Jewett: I think this is probably not an uncommon experience. We originally believed that we would contract it out. We believe we were a subsurface innovation company, and we would get to greenfield developments, we would build out the subsurface and then we would basically use a full wrap EPC on the top side building. Geothermal power facilities isn’t new. We weren’t using new technology on the power side. We were using proven organic rank and cycle turbines and binary cycle power plants, air cooled power facilities, and we thought that we could sort of pay for a full wrap EPC and tie bow on it. Of course, we get there and it’s not quite as obvious as we had initially anticipated. I think we found some of the similar trends that we found on the subsurface side, which when we started bringing these oil and gas concepts to traditional geothermal folks, there was a lot of skepticism.
You can’t hit those drilling rates in granite if you can’t hit that build rate to a lateral well in granite. You can’t do a plug and perf operation, hydraulic fracturing operation in granite in the same way that you can in an oil and gas shale. There are so many different things that you can’t do in geothermal. Then we then showed over time, we actually can do all of those things. And I think when we started designing the power facilities side of things, we actually started hitting some of a similar mindset that was like, oh, we’ve built a ton of these power facilities and this is just how it’s done in geothermal. And as you can imagine, we’re an incredibly tight budget. And we would say like, okay, but what if you did it this way? You could actually save 40% of the cost. And the answer would be like, oh, well, that’s not the way that it’s done in geothermal.
And once you start to sort of tear apart, why is it not done that way? I think more often than not, we found not very compelling answers. And so I think more and more and more we started to kind of de-scope portions of the power facilities and gathering system, the TD of Infras structure to think about engineering it ourselves. And here we are without a full wrap BPC. Now we do have a ton of external support and our external partners are incredibly important to us on the construction side and on the engineering side, but we have put it together in a much more piecemeal fashion than we had originally imagined.
Lara Pierpoint: Actually, I had a conversation with Jamie Beard on Catalyst about two years ago, and one of the things that obviously had her very excited was the fact that she could bring worlds to collide in the oil and gas industry and in geothermal, which is obviously a very green power production opportunity. So how have you experienced that? We’re in a moment of peak political polarization in some sense, and you’re literally leveraging some really incredible people resources, ideas from the oil and gas sector and bringing them into what is fundamentally a clean power climate forward solution. How has that felt? Has there been a lot of receptivity to that? How are you all interacting with the Texas ecosystem?
Sarah Jewett: Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day it is incredibly hopeful story and it’s hopeful for people from very different angles. So I started my career in the oil and gas industry as well. 12 years ago I was running frac crews in the Western United States, and I was a field hand for Schlumberger, and there are a lot of people like me on the team. So we have about 60% of our team comes from the oil and gas industry, and I think a lot of them are motivated by the idea of what I call using our powers for good. It’s using all of the skills and experience and knowledge we picked up in the oil and gas industry and applying it for something that can help fight climate change. I think that’s a big motivator for a lot of people. I think another big motivator is just the idea that they can use very similar technical skills, but apply this additional layer of innovation.
We learned how to do it in shale or we learned how to do it in offshore drilling and we’re going to learn how to do it here. And that’s just really exciting to a lot of people from a technical perspective. And then it’s just a hugely bipartisan solution. It’s like if you’re a fan of oil and gas, in some ways we’re reinvigorating and bolstering the oil and gas industry because we’re using all of these service companies. All the big name service companies that service the oil and gas industry are servicing us today. So Schlumberger, Halliburton, baker, Hughes, all the big dogs have set foot on Cape Station. And so we are actually providing all of them with a great deal of certainty, especially in the event that geothermal energy scales. So that’s just huge economic stability for a large sector that has built out its infrastructure over time, and that is uniquely American in some ways. So I think in that way we are a very uniquely bipartisan energy system because we’re doing things that kind of bol also the talking points on both sides of the aisle.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay. So looking ahead a little bit, we are in a really interesting moment, particularly with the build out of AI and data centers and hyper scaling requirements around the future of how we are going to do computing, particularly in this country. And of course, when I hear people talk about power production to support this build out of data centers, generally we hear about natural gas, which is interesting because it’s not a clean source of fuel. We can theoretically build it quickly, although I think we’ve got another thing coming around how slow it’s going to be to procure turbines. We talk about nuclear, which is of course, as all of our listeners know, one of my great loves. But the nuclear industry has a lot of work to do to kind of get things moving on a timeline that’s going to be relevant. Why don’t we talk more about geothermal in these conversations?
Sarah Jewett: That’s a great question, Lara. I think it is an industry that’s been slow and sleepy for a long time, and unfortunately the nuclear energy industry has also been slow, sleepy for a long time, but has somehow gained an immense amount of marketing momentum or something over the last few years. But I think the proof is going to be in the pudding very soon. There is one company that’s building a hundred megawatt firm clean energy project that’s going to be delivered in 2026, and that’s a geothermal company. And so I hope that as the AI race has actually served an incredible purpose in elevating the potential of geothermal because if we are truly in an AI race that is stoking the expediency and the dire need for building all of these different data centers and all of these different things that are going to require a huge amount of energy. And then the next question is, where are we going to get all that energy? Now people start looking around and they see that, okay, there are a couple of energy solutions that are capable of providing this, and wow, boom, this a hundred megawatt project just came up. I think that that’s going to be incredibly powerful. So I don’t know why geothermal hasn’t gotten the rep of being the hip cool energy source, and maybe we just need to get in with more tiktoks to get the word around. Who knows.
Lara Pierpoint: I have one last question. If I were to wire a hundred million dollars into FervoS bank account tomorrow, what would you do with it?
Sarah Jewett: Pay tariffs. No, just kidding. What would I do with it? I mean, I would put it towards building the largest single geothermal power facility that’s come to mind in 20 years.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s a great answer. I love that answer. Thank you for giving us some good moments of emotion and excitement for you all. It sounds like it’s been a really incredible journey.
Sarah Jewett: Well, Laura, you’re very fun to talk to. It sounds like you have had lots of fun experiences that we could talk about over a beer.
Lara Pierpoint: Yes, I think that is definitely true. Sarah Jewett is the Vice President of Strategy at FerFervo Energy. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Lara Pierpoint. Our producer is Erin Hardick. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you’d like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to thegreenblueprint@latitudemedia.com. You can listen to The Green Blueprint at latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get podcasts. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the Clean Energy economy.
